Robust twitter solution needed.

February 4, 2012 12:03 PM

Best twitter setup for a very active user?

Got a couple of friends tearing their hair over their respective twitter setups. They are both pretty prolific and find the solutions they are using less than useless. The main problem seems to be that they have a fair amount of followers and followees. The latest quote was:

That, when you leave the app, you can continue reading all the tweets that has appeared after that without the app cutting tweets, jumping to the most recent tweets or makes you click "more" to continue reading from the last one you read.

M has 1000 followers and is following 500. She is running an pure Apple environment, some sorta macbook and a 3Gs iphone.

S has 5000 followers and is following 1000. She is on a netbook (windows based is my assumption) and a slightly crappy android phone.

Make me their hero, tell me what power users are running this season.

posted by Iteki to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Is this for a business or supporting some sort of larger online identity? What I'm really asking is are they willing to pay for it? As the very active Twitterers I know use something like HootSuite to manage their social media presence.
posted by geoff. at 12:46 PM on February 4, 2012

Best answer: If you click on a tweet on twitter.com, you can see what software's been used to post each one.

So I was curious and had a look through the top 15 or so. I don't know how accurately these guys are reported, but it seems like most people use the web client. Second most popular seems to be Twitter for iPhone and UberSocial for Blackberry, with Sendible and WhoSay following.

Anecdotally, I see tools like HootSuite, CoTweet and Sprout Social being used more and more.
posted by Magnakai at 12:54 PM on February 4, 2012

The Twitter API has limits in place for things like the number of timeline tweets that can be retrieved and how far back you can go in time.

The need to:
- "disappear" tweets from the interface
- forget where you're reading and "skip" you to the present
- click on a "more" button to continue reading

is each Twitter application's way around these arbitrary limits.

If you're following several hundred users for some period of time, you will inevitably run into this issue no matter what application you're using. Even a desktop computer that is continuously loading tweets will reach an "end" point (I know it used to be 20 pages worth of tweets).
posted by kathryn at 1:14 PM on February 4, 2012

The current limit for a home timeline seems to be 800 tweets. Twitter won't let you load any more than that, so without a sneaky (and API consuming) client, you just can't load more than that. No such client exists, as far as I've found, and the clients I've tried won't even attempt to load that many.
posted by WasabiFlux at 2:55 PM on February 4, 2012

I heartily recommend the website Twitter.com and the app called "Twitter," owned by the makers of Twitter. That sounds very sarcastic, but they're really pretty much the best existing products.

For the "cut-off" issue, they should investigate using Twitter lists. If they divide and conquer, they'll not "miss" tweets so much with cut-offs, I think.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 3:38 PM on February 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

The go-to app for twitter goliaths is tweetdeck, developed independently for power users and then bought out by Twitter in 2011. Bit of a learning curve, but that'd definitely be my first stop.
posted by churl at 3:59 PM on February 4, 2012

Hootsuite is your best bet. The real problem here is the misperception that you'll ever be able to read every tweet in a stream of 500+ people. You need to use smaller lists for that purpose.
posted by hon3yb4dger at 9:20 PM on February 4, 2012